1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a receiving apparatus and method and, more particularly, to a receiving apparatus which can receive a digital television broadcast signal and can reproduce image and sound data, and its method.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, digital television broadcast using a satellite broadcast or cable broadcast system has been started. Upon implementation of digital broadcast, many effects such as improvement of qualities of image and sound data including audio data, increases in the number of kinds and volume of programs exploiting various compression techniques, provision of new services such as an interactive service and the like, advance of the receiving pattern, and the like, are expected.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing the arrangement of a digital broadcast receiver 10 using satellite broadcast.
A television (TV) broadcast wave transmitted from a broadcast satellite is received by an antenna 1. The received TV broadcast wave is tuned by a tuner 2 to demodulate TV information. After that, an error correction process, and a charging process, descramble process, and the like if necessary are done, although not shown. Various data multiplexed as the TV information are demultiplexed by a multiplexed signal demultiplexer 3. The TV information is demultiplexed into image information, sound information, and other additional data. The demultiplexed data are decoded by a decoder 4. Of the decoded data, image information and sound information are converted into analog data by a D/A converter 5, and these data are reproduced by a television receiver (TV) 6. On the other hand, the additional data has a role of program sub-data, and is associated with various functions.
Furthermore, a VTR 7 is used to record/reproduce the received TV information. The receiver 10 and VTR 7 are connected via a digital interface such as IEEE1394 or the like. The VTR 7 has a recording format such as a digital recording system, and records TV information as bitstream data based on, e.g., D-VHS Note that TV information of digital TV broadcast can be recorded not only by bitstream recording based on D-VHS, but also by the digital Video (DV) format as another home-use digital recording scheme, or digital recording apparatuses using various disk media. In such case, format conversion may often be required.
When a TV program in ground wave broadcast or digital TV broadcast is reproduced by a home television, it is a common practice to directly display a video sent from a broadcast station. In other words, it is not a common practice to erase an object in a video or to change the object size so as to effectively change the display pattern (layout). Such a function of effectively changing the display layout is mandatory since a new function of an effective display method must be added as the numbers of channels and programs increase upon development of digital TV broadcast.
For example, the user wants to set a layout in the following situation. That is, live programs of baseball games have different display layouts depending on broadcast stations although they belong to an identical category. For this reason, in order to display an object such as a score indication or the like in a common layout independently of broadcast stations, it is desirable to be able to set a layout the user wants.
Furthermore, the user also wants to set a layout in the following situation. For example, the user may want to display necessary information in an enlarged scale or to quit display of unnecessary information in accordance with the days of week or time band. However, neither of such layout setups are possible in the status quo.